The Dispatch Podcast - Life Under Coronavirus

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Sarah and the guys discuss all things coronavirus. Is federalism working? Are people taking the pandemic seriously? Impact on foreign policy? Relief packages on Capitol Hill? Future of the Democratic primary? And how are the guys talking to their kids about the outbreak? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, Stephen Hayes, and David French. Today, coronavirus, the overreactions, the underreactions, the trusted media, and what Congress is looking to do. And maybe we'll end with just a little bit of the primaries last night and where the Bernie Sanders movement goes from here. And on a lighter note, how are the guys talking to their kids about what's going on in the country right now? Is this, the next generation, 9-11? Let's get right to it. Things have changed a lot since last week for us and for a lot of people around the country.

So just want to acknowledge that we are in a little bit of a different pod setup this week. Steve, where are you right now? I am on the, sort of in our attic, basically, that's been remade as a podcast studio sitting here surrounded by pillows. And if we can expect fun interruptions, where would those interruptions come from? I made everybody who's staying with us right now. We've got my own family and another family whose house was just gutted last week, stay with us. So I made everybody take a walk. So they're off with the walk, all ten of them, and the dog.

So I hope we won't have any interruptions, but my getting up to speed technically on this took us so long that they may be back soon. David, you're actually in your most usual pod situation. You're in your closet. You're not wearing your Rockets hoodie, I notice, which may be just a signal of the weather changing in Tennessee. No, I'm in my do-it-yourself podcast studio that we constructed. And, no, today I'm wearing a T-shirt that I got at the demilitarized zone in Korea when I was serving in Korea during Operation Key Resolve 2010. Nice humble brag, noted. Vintage.

Vintage. And Jonah, I think listeners will be the most disappointed I am to hear where you are for those who follow. the trials and travails of Zoe and Gracie and Ralph and Pippa. I'm in that old abandoned mental institution off Route 7. It's not creepy at all. No, I actually went into the dispatch offices. Knowing that none of us would be there. Knowing that since no one's here and the Wi-Fi is great and the Wi-Fi has been

glitchy at my house and the dogs have become so unbelievably loud and needy during this trying time that I just thought this was, and my daughter was back and has a penchant for streaming video constantly. I just thought this was the best course of action. All right. Appreciate it. I got to say, looking at all of us, Steve kind of looks like he's calling from a rehab center. David looks like he's calling from the space station. And you look like there are sounds coming from inside your house and a clawed hand is going to come out from behind the door, Sarah, and whisk you away. You're very horror movie looking. So I am in the closet underneath our staircase with the board games to prop up the microphone and then I built a pillow fort around the

microphone on top of the board games. I have to leave the door cracked so that they can see me at all. And the result is that I have two cats, but my cat, Zui, has already opened the door, me out at me loudly, then stepped right outside the door and thrown up. So that's the potential interruptions from my head, although he seems to have given up now. Let's dive right in, given our explanations for why things are funny today. David, I'm going to start with you on this one, I think. Okay. in part because you wrote this great piece about some of the legal issues surrounding why you can close churches,

why governors are the ones making these decisions and not the president. And I think that legal explanation is great, but there's also kind of a realism explanation that that's not 1918 anymore. I've really enjoyed, I've done tons of reading on 1918. I'm loving this like 100 years ago thing that I'm living in. But in the modern media era and where we are, having people follow 50 different guidelines of what's closed, what's open. Some people are heralding this as a victory for federalism, but I think there's just a reality that it's pretty confusing to have federalism all of a sudden for a lot of people.

I think federalism is more confusing on Twitter than it is in the lives that people normally lead. Because if you're on Twitter, you're seeing all of the different standards and all of the different localities and municipalities and states coming in all at one. once. The Oklahoma governor seems to be chill about this, that, you know, out in California, Governor Newsom is, you know, leading, is endorsing some of the more draconian measures that the cities are doing in California. And you just get this whirlwind of information coming in if you're living on social media, especially if you're living on Twitter. By contrast, if you're looking at other forms of media, if you're getting most of your news from

local news, if you're getting some of your sort of the, your rumor news from your friends on Facebook, a lot of that's bearing down on the local situation. And so I think that this is one of those instances where we find out that Americans live really different lives, not just in different places, but they live different, you know, it's not just that people in Alabama I live a different life from New York, it's a, depending on how you get your information, your perception of what is going on is wildly different. It's already quite clear to me that amongst my extended group of friends here in Tennessee that there's a cohort that it's as if the coronavirus is just sort of this faint buzzing in the back of their mind. This is not something that is truly

impact in their lives. And there's another cohort that this is absolutely front and center. And it And it really seems to be determined based on who is spending more time vacuuming up information online. And I do think that that's that the triumph of federalism in the sense of state and local officials taking control of the precise guidelines in their region is a way to cut through this in the sense that rather than having people receive a whole bunch of different levels of information and trying to regulate their activity according to, there is one source of police power in their community and that single source of police power is the one that establishes the guidelines. And it's up to us to determine and to know those guidelines and to follow them. So Steve, super interesting just following up on what David just said here on the trust numbers of where people are trusting the information that they're getting about coronavirus. Not surprisingly, President Trump, 2% of Democratic.

sorry 8% of Democrats have a good amount or a great deal of trust Republicans, it's a much, much, you know, well over half. But then when you go to the news media, that kind of flips. Democrats have a lot more trust in the news media,

Republicans not so much. This follows actually both his approval numbers for the most part and the media's approval numbers for the most part are trusted media numbers from Gallup and Pew. But when you get it, down to state and local governments, those partisan differences melt away quite a bit. There's a little bit, but not a ton. And when you get to public health experts, the numbers get really,

really large of trust in public health experts. Is that good? I mean, it's good that people trust public health experts, I think. The rest of it is, I think, sad and disappointing, but unsurprising, right i mean we're looking at this new problem uh through the prism of polarization just as as so much of what we do on a day-to-day basis before this was seen through the prism of polarization and i think the difference is this has real public health implications for the people who are listen the media i would say are are you know you have some in the media i would say that are, as always, eager to kind of play gotcha with the administration, with the federal response, with politicians in generally.

But as a broader proposition, I think the media are mostly amplifying the voices of the public health professionals and doing so with some urgency in their reporting. And the reporting is pretty alarming, I would say, and has been really now. for several weeks. On the other hand, you have the administration that has pretty consistently until really just this week downplayed the potential significance of this pandemic. And, of course, the president has his own amplifiers throughout the conservative media. And you're seeing this difference reflected not only in the approval, disapproval numbers for the president and how he's handling this, but in the more substantive numbers of how people themselves are dealing with

this. We're thinking about this. And as David said, I mean, you have people, this wide disparity between the kind of people who are bunkered down have created this bubble around themselves or their family and are not allowing that bubble to be penetrated for any reason, taking sort of social distancing very seriously. And then you have others who, you know, as we've seen in pictures on social media and no doubt in our conversations with friends who are not taking this seriously at all. You know, you'll get a text message from somebody who talks about how they were out all day yesterday, out and about. I think that's coming to an end, both because of the change in tone from the president and the administration, but also

because there are just fewer things for people to do. If you want to be social, you can't really be so. There are a limited number of places to go. The final point I'll make is if you look at that number of public health professionals and how they're seen, I think it was 84%. People have faith in public health officials. 84% of people have faith that they're getting the truth from public health professionals. That is among many reasons that I think the administration would be wise to even step up the extent to which it is putting the communications of the day-to-day here in the hands of people like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Berks and others. They provide good information.

They usually do it pretty quickly after it's verified, and people trust them. So I think it's advice the president would never take, even if you were listening. here. But the best thing the president can do right now is to step back and let those people do the talking. So, Jenna, speaking of that, there was some interesting reporting that said that actually in one of the most recent press conferences, the president wasn't supposed to be there. It was going to be Pence and Fauci and Berks. And then he saw that they were all going out. And it was like, oh, I'll just go sit in the front row, which would be a little odd in the White House press room. And then he walked out and went to the podium.

to Steve's point, at the same time, are we willing to say that because of an era of polarization, we don't want to hear from the president anymore on an issue of such national concern? Where do you fall down? And for that matter, not use the news media as a filter to get information out there because some people don't trust various parts of the news media. Yeah. So I have a slightly more rosy take on all. all this, and Steve does.

First of all, I think that some of the, that if you look at things through a purely partisan prism and the narrative of polarization that we've all been reading about and talking about for the last three or 30 years, it looks kind of depressing. But I think there are other skews here. Young people tend to just not listen to authority. You could look it up. Or any rock song? And there's also, you know, the big sort isn't just a political thing.

It also has to do with the fact that, like, people who live in red states, a lot of them, you know, including, like, the hardcore Fox viewers, tend to live in places that are much less densely populated. Yeah, that's a good point. It just seems like less of an issue. There's also a great tradition in this country of people who get away from the coasts of just thinking that the coastal people are kind of, of losing their minds. And I'm not defending, you know, dismissing this stuff, but the fact that these people are telling pollsters they actually believe the public health officials to high numbers tells you that they're just, that there are other filters and other screens going on and

how they look at this stuff. At the same time, you know, look, I mean, I agree with Steve that it would definitely be, I think it would be in Trump's best interest if he could find, if he could calibrate his presence a little lower and a little less, you know, front and center, that said, look, I'm on record. I thought that that addressed to the country on Wednesday night last week was indisputably the worst televised national address in American history by a U.S. president in its development, its delivery, its content, its effect, every single way I thought it was a complete

disaster. I'm perfectly happy to say that. Since then, he's gotten a lot better. And we can argue about whether people are grading Trump on a curve. That's sort of unfair is saying that this has been Trump's most presidential performance, sort of like saying the best gas station sushi in Alabama. You know, it's saying something, but it's just not saying a lot. Those are all legitimate arguments to have.

But it shouldn't shock us that there is a discrepancy in the way people are taking this stuff in, particularly since some of our colleagues at Fox News, only a week ago, we're still downplaying this and saying this was just another impeachment effort. It takes a little time for that stuff to sort of saturate in and get out there. And on the federalism stuff, I think it's great. I think the fact that people are believing their local officials is more than they're believing national officials is as it should be. And it is a sign that people actually trust the people who know, who they know better, who know how they live, who know what the problems are closer to the

ground. That's better. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. I want to denationalize our politics as much as possible, even if that's a problem. It creates a challenge for public health issues. As a general thing, I think it is a better and more fulfilling way to organize a society. And so I'm hoping that we can get some benefit out of this in the long run. so some fun numbers just because that's uh you know my main job here i think uh you know we look at trust in news media and i think when pollsters call someone and give such a broad-based question they go to whatever they're sort of thinking of in an outrage bubble probably the most quickly but you look at local journalists Jonah to your point on sort of let's call it media federalism

uh local journalists are seen as more caring 36 percent more trustworthy 29 percent neutral and unbiased, 23%, it is by far the most trusted part of news is the nightly local news program when you ask people what they believe. Now, it doesn't mean they're not watching cable news or network news or even looking at Twitter. But as far as what they believe, it's, you know, in Houston at least, it's the 5 o'clock news. And I also think a big problem that's looming right now, there's going to be a lot of cultural things that are going to unexpected cultural things to come out of all of us being at home more and with our loved ones more hopefully some good things probably some bad things i'm concerned that one of the main things will be people spending more time on twitter which i already think was undermining a lot of reporting there's great studies out there about how skewed reporters mindsets get being on twitter too much in terms of determining what's news what stories to chase. And this is just the number I like telling my students all the time.

So 50 million U.S. adults are on Twitter. Of those, 6% account for 73% of the tweets on national politics. So that means fewer than 1% of Americans are frequently weighing in about politics on Twitter. And of course, they're not representative. three out of the four tweets in 2019 about national politics were written by someone over the age of 50. Three of those four tweets about national politics were written by people who strongly disapprove of Trump. They're more likely to be college-educated, liberal, wealthier, to live on the coast, obviously, and a little bit more likely to be Democratic, weirdly, than Republican.

But that's actually the least skewed part of all of the skews on Twitter. and so as reporters in particular to me have this sort of free time at home, I think it could be really bad as they get even more addicted to Twitter. Yeah. Well, you know, Sarah, I think that's an excellent point. And it's also what we're seeing is that a lot of this stuff is still being filtered through the imperative of the fight, that there always has to be a fight. And it's not super satisfying to fight a virus because the virus doesn't tweet back at you.

So we're on how many days have we been fighting about this? Is it the Wuhan virus or is it the Chinese virus or is it not? Which is just one of the more absurd public controversies I've ever seen, but a tremendous amount of intensity. We've got a wing of sort of Maga Twitter who is saying that the media hates you and is so panic for the purpose of destroying people's lives and livelihoods to get Trump. You've got, so you have this constant fight. And of course, it's taking, conducting against a backdrop of, you know, this is President Own the Libs. You know, this is, why do we love him? Because he fights. Well, now you have a situation where President Own the Libs has to become,

if you're looking at where the outbreaks are and where the intensity of the outbreaks are, president own the libs has to be president save the libs and is it any is it any surprise that a lot of the people who are now in these urban areas after you have a guy who was elected in part to continually fight them every step of the way is it any surprise that they look at him and say I'm not sure I trust you to have my best interests at heart and I think you're exactly right sir I think it's exactly, we're absolutely in a situation where we have a social media culture that is built for combat, that, but is not built to combat a biological organism. It's built for combat between other human beings. And, you know, I have an increasing number of friends who are just telling me, I've got to log off. I just, I have to log off. Well, and I'm as guilty as anyone. I'm spending tons of time on Twitter.

One thing I just want to push back on a little bit, I wrote a column saying that this fight over what they're called the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus or whatever was a huge waste of time, even if I think that the right basically has the better part of the argument. I'm starting to change my mind on this as the Chinese government engages more and more forcefully with serious propaganda campaigns against the United States. saying that it was an army experiment gone awry or that it was, you know, created by Americans implanted in China. And given China's own behavior, I mean, I agree, it is, I hate the argument on Twitter because it is such a own the libs kind of argument and a distraction. And reminds me a little bit about the rush to talk about free speech and libraries after 9-11, because it was the only place that the left felt like they had something to say. But that said, it's, you know, pushing back against what China is doing here, I think is kind of important. And we wouldn't

be quite in this position if the World Health Organization hadn't very early on caved to pressure from China in how they were going to name it, how they're going to treat it, their warnings against stigmatizing Asians and all of the rest. I mean, the Chinese seem to be, and I think this is a sign the weakness of the Chinese government and Xi's precarious situation is that they're basically following the Putin play of exploiting the West's sort of political correctness stuff and telling their own populations for domestic consumption that they are at a war with the West in order to prop up the fragility of their own regimes. And it's something we've got to take seriously because it could get out of hand really, really quickly. So anyway, Steve, I mean,

you've thought a lot about the Russia-China alliance. as such in general, but this is playing out in a whole different way. Yeah, and I agree with Jonah. I mean, I think it's at once a distraction from the real issue, this fight, and I think a lot of the people who are waging this fight, you know, there are people who are pretending that the very most important thing we ought to settle right now is whether we call this the Wuhan virus or the China coronavirus or what have you. I don't think that the naming of this is the most important thing, but I have zero.

zero problem with people calling it the China coronavirus. I don't think it's racist. And there have been a number of really frightening accounts in newspapers in recent days about the behavior of the Chinese government. In the early stages of this, decisions that they made to shut down doctors who were sounding alarms about this to cut off research that was taking place that helped identify this, the ways in which they were censoring people in their private conversations from talking about this. There is zero doubt that a big part of the blame for this, when we look back on this in 50 years or 100 years, will go to the Chinese government's determination to keep people talking about it and failure to alert the rest of the world about this. It's also why I think

we should be very skeptical of the numbers coming out of China today. You have, I think, too many people looking at the numbers coming out of China and saying, well, basically they've defeated this or it's totally on the way. I'm not sure that we can trust those numbers. We can hope that they're right. And if they're right, that they're a harbinger of things that we might see here if we take somewhat similar steps in sort of the day-to-day handling of this. But I think there's great reason to be very skeptical about this. Well, you know, in defense of my position quickly, who are we wanting to own here? It's the CCP.

It's the Chinese propaganda itself. Having this battle with CNN over, they said Wuhan four months ago, and now they say COVID-19, that's very nicely suited for our domestic, our pre-coronavirus domestic political squabble. I think directly confronting the Chinese propaganda, like, for example, which I've seen you do, Jonah, on Twitter, where these Chinese tweets are just absurd, like just absurd. It's like what you would imagine if, like, Khrushchev's people were on Twitter at the height of the Cold War. I think directly confronting the Chinese propaganda itself is extremely valuable. This long-running, how can I search through the Twitter feeds of various CNN reporters and see how they've evolved in describing the virus, much less interesting to me.

I agree with that. So I'm sure, for sure. I also want to highlight that, you know, back to the point of like not all media is media, we sort of talk about trust in media or the media does this. you know the times the london times not the new york times on march first i just don't think this got nearly enough attention but it's incredible reporting with some very brave reporters in china as well chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in december lead paragraph chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late december last year but they

were ordered to stop tests destroy samples and suppress the news a chinese media outlet has revealed I mean, if you don't think that's bravery in China to publish something like that, you're missing the point, and that's the stuff that we should be, I mean, debating wildly, talking about highlighting. It was March 1st, and, you know, I get that our country was sort of dealing with how to deal with this domestically right now quickly, but that's a conversation that has yet to be had as a nation here of how you now deal with China moving forward when their regime, unit basically has caused a worldwide epidemic. Yeah, that was one of the articles I was referring to. There was another very good one in the Wall Street Journal just over the past couple of days with additional details and a third in the Washington Post. I mean, I do think this is going to be one of the real long-term outcomes of this is dealing with what's plainly a hostile regime in China. I think it's been increasingly apparent that that's been the case. We have seen China help. the U.S. enemies over the years with increasing frequency and with increasing, I would say,

aggressiveness. And now this is laid bare. And it's not just that they censored all of the information in effect coming out of China with respect to this disease and shut down reporters who wanted to report about the doctors who wanted to warn people about it. They have now kicked out reporters, American reporters for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, which means in all certainty that we will have less information about what the Chinese government is up to with respect to this. And if, in fact, there is a second wave of this, or if, if, in fact, the numbers that they're providing to the WHO and others are not accurate numbers, as we know that they weren't at the beginning of this, we'll have.

have much less ability to track that and to know that. And I think that brings sort of another level of danger, again, at the feet of the Chinese. And it'd be nice to see as much outrage over the naming of the virus as them kicking our reporters out. Yeah. Right. No, that would be nice. But also, you know, the one child policy and the cultural genocide and sometimes actual genocide against Uyghurs, those are bigger issues too than whether we call, you know, the Kung flu or not. But the point I was trying to make, though, is that people have heard me say this a million times on my other podcast and elsewhere that, you know, the Chinese government is almost as afraid of its own people, as its people are afraid of it. And you can tell that a lot of this has to do with Xi realizing that this was a major blow. to his stature and reputation as an infallible leader of China.

And if you read up on what the media climate and the political climate is like in Russia, Russia has basically been telling its citizens that they are in a de facto war with the United States for a very long time, sort of a Cold War thing, but that the United States is trying to undermine them, that NATO is trying to destroy Russia, Russia. It's all that kind of stuff. And it is, it is a way to justify Putin staying in power

indefinitely. And it seems to me that this is a real sign of Xi's weakness and the Communist Party's weakness that they are going so hard and so fast at following this kind of Putin propaganda approach, which says the West is insulting us. The West is attacking us with bio-weapons. This is a way to sort of divert attention the way Putin does, divert attention from the own failures of the government, the really palpable outrage in China about how the Wuhan virus was handled. I mean, I listened to a couple Chinese-based podcasts, and people don't really appreciate just like how, you know,

there's almost a green-type revolution brewing among the Chinese in their outrage about how all of this was handled. And this approach is something, and it's something just to be on the watch for it because I don't know that Trump is the best capable person for dealing with nationalistic jingoism from China that is designed to arouse anger from him to justify their propaganda.

This could get kind of ugly pretty quickly, and it's a real concern of mine. Yeah, I think if you're looking at sort of the difference between BC before coronavirus and AC after coronavirus foreign policy, going in both directions, there's a very real possibility of something that looks a lot more like the Cold War than before the coronavirus. That it's going to be in our interest. And I think a lot of the, a lot of folks have been sort of banging the drum about we don't need to be dependent on China for anything that is essential to our public health system, to our national defense infrastructure.

All of those things, I think that's a, those are very legitimate concern. At the same time, I think that there's going to be, it's going to be in the mutual interest of the Chinese regime to, it's going to be in the interest of the Chinese regime to take every single thing that we do to declare sort of independence from Chinese supply chains in essential industries as further evidence of the American war against the West, I mean, America's war against China, and that will contribute to their own jingoism and their own nationalism. there's not an easy way through that. And we have to understand that a Cold War, a renewed sort of Cold War with China has a lot of ramifications, including in the Korean Peninsula, because part of one of the positive side effects of our closer relationship with China as the Soviet Union unwound and collapsed, et cetera. One of the side benefits is that China was no longer so directly infusing arms and sustenance into the North Korean regime. You could easily see in a post, a new Cold War that China doesn't just sort of recoil against the West in the United States. It also extends

an extraordinarily dangerous military lifeline and economic lifeline to North Korea, dramatically enhancing its military power, which it could do very quickly and very easily. So this is going to be a fraught and delicate situation going forward, AC, after coronavirus, where we could very well face a situation where we've got sort of the Cold War that's reemerged against Russia with a new Cold War against a far more economically and militarily powerful and potentially military powerful Chinese regime. And that's going to be a different kind of world. So we've definitely looked long-term AC, as David said. Looking now incredibly short-term, far more domestic, there appears to be a lot more bipartisan support for a, you know, check to every American,

the Romney Cotton, versions of a plan than there is for a payroll tax break, for instance. Steve, I know you talk to a lot of these folks on the Hill pretty often. And are you hearing anything different? No, not much. I mean, I think the Trump administration early and several people on the hill were pushing a payroll tax cut immediately and saw that as a remedy, if not quite a panacea. I think the preferences have shifted among many Republicans to this plan. Mitt Romney has one version of it, which is $1,000 per every adult. Tom Cotton has sort of another version of it, I think that includes kids. And I think that's becoming

sort of the de facto Republican position. Democrats like it, I think generally think it doesn't go far enough. But what's interesting to me is you have the president who's not, of course, been afraid to spend over his first three years in office hearing that the total bill was going to be in the neighborhood of $800, $850 billion and saying, we've got to really go big, let's make it a trillion. And it's a similar kind of argument you heard emerge out of the president's top advisors when there was a discussion over infrastructure, and the numbers came in below a trillion, and the president kept bumping it up to a trillion to this big round number. Look, I mean, I think this is a really, this is a challenging place for small government conservatives who have

been very concerned with debt and deficits over the years. We in our short life here at the dispatch have published a number of articles. It's been one of the things that we've really tried to highlight, $23.4 trillion in debt. And one of the things that we had argued was that it was irresponsible to spend the way that we were spending and to have neither political party take a serious look at entitlement reform, which is the path to lower. the debt if there is one to be had and not doing that in in peacetime with a strong economy or relative peacetime with a strong economy the spending kept growing and growing and growing and there was no determination by virtually anybody at least

among elected officials to do anything about it when there was an opportunity to do something about it now of course is the time when you arguably need the government to take these kinds of drastic measures to infuse additional cash into the, into the system and, uh, and look at the ways that we can save sort of structural or, or help save structural, uh, parts of the economy. Uh, but the, the sad outcome is that we're going to be adding considerably to that $23.4 trillion in debt. And I just don't think there's, there's a way around it. Jonah, I'm going to see if I can pick a fight with you. I don't think that if we send, he's putting

his dukes up guys i don't think if we send let's let's take the romney plan because it's just easier a thousand dollars to every adult i don't think it should be means tested go um i think it should be means tested but um i i think it was josh barrow had a good suggestion if it's easier to get it out quickly to everybody send it to everybody but then create a sort of a viral cultural campaign for the people who don't need it they should give it to people, you know, just give it away in tips, you know, buy gift certificates at stores. I'm going to, there are a couple places I'm going to be doing that this week. But, you know, two points on this.

One is, I mean, I don't know if this is picking a fight with you or not, but I am deeply skeptical any of this is going to work. I mean, like any of it. I'm deeply skeptical that the quarantining is going to work. The idea that you're going to keep people from making a money for six weeks, two months, I'm not sure I buy it I'm not sure the economy can take it I'm not sure people want the tradeoff that's involved in that I'm not sure it's going to work as a public health matter because the odds are as most people are going to get the virus anyway I'm also not sure I mean people call

this a stimulus I don't know how stimulative giving people a thousand dollars is when they're losing two or three thousand dollars a month by not working and this is not a criticism I don't know what to do and this may be the smartest best thing to do you know it's like if your house is burning um and you grab a pot full of water and someone says well that's not the best pot for carrying water it's like yeah but that's the one i got right now right you know you there's a time value here about doing something fast both on the psychological level and an economic level so maybe this is the best thing to do with the tools that are at hand in this moment but um it is not obvious to me that the path that we're taking is going to work out, that it is necessarily

the path that you would have prescribed if you gave us these kinds of facts six months ago, gave the experts, you know, this fact pattern six months ago and said, how would you respond to this? I'm not sure this is how, what they would come up with. And I am not sure that in two years from now, when we look back on this, we're going to say, wow, we handled that just right. That said, and this is something I've been planning on writing about. Can we, you know, One of the great rules of, it turns out, of global pandemics is other than the fact that they cause old people to die and people to freak out, they also end up confirming all of the priors of ideologues. And so all the socialists think that this proves that socialism is worthwhile. All the capitalists, you know, like me, it proves all sorts of things about capitalists and all the rest.

And I'm going to write about a bit about that for the dispatch today and tomorrow. but, you know, for the people who denounce the United States or even the Trump administration is just caring about money and just caring about the stock market, this country is incurring trillions of dollars of losses in economic activity and lost value in the stock market to protect literally the least productive members of society. And I don't mean that as a criticism. That is a good and noble thing. And the people who want to say that America is this heartless place where we just sort of write off, you know, the people who aren't, you know, members of the working class or the proletariat, the means of production is garbage.

What America is doing is unbelievably self-sacrificing and heroic. And, you know, one of the points that I think is sort of hilarious is that all of the nationalists and all of the socialists who say we desperately need to get out of capitalism to, you know, to unite this. country can't you know are you know the people that they think are on their side are young people and they're the least likely to actually want to participate in the solidarity stuff um but uh you know let's take it just step back and recognize what this society is doing in terms of just the hit it is taking to protect the most vulnerable and least economically productive people in our society and that is something that should if it doesn't contradict some of their your anti capitalist rhetoric and assumptions, then you're not really paying attention.

David? Well, let me give my three cheers for Romney Bucks for a minute. First, I really want Romney Bucks to be a thing, but I think it's only a thing in our dispatch comment boards. But so here's what I would say for non-mean tested cash infusion. One is I think it's just wrong. to say that above a certain level of income, people are not strapped for cash. That's, I just think that's wrong. I think above certain levels of income people are less likely to be strapped for cash. But it's just wrong to say here at a certain level, it's easy street.

Paycheck to paycheck is a phenomenon that runs up and down the, runs up and down American social classes, always has. Certainly with the super rich, it's not true. but as a general matter, everyone from working class, middle class, upper middle class, there's a large number of people in all of these social strata who are paycheck to paycheck. Number two, even though it's absolutely true that a thousand for each adult or whatever it turns out to be is going to be less than what people are losing, what it does allow you to do is at least take care for an awful lot of people of the most essential expense. So, for example, if you're looking at an array of expenses just to sort of like take my

household, for example, you have a mortgage and you also have tuition. So the mortgage is where you live and then you're paying tuition, say, for college that has been canceled. And so I'm putting lower on the priority scale. Sorry, University of Tennessee. You'll get your money. Don't worry. But if I had to make those choices, if I was in a situation, where I had to make those choices, I'm keeping the roof over our family's head. And I think that at least what that does is it allows you, it gives people that ability to make that really fundamental key choice. The second thing about it is, unlike a payroll tax cut, it could very well end up being much less expensive than a payroll tax cut. To the fiscal responsibility

point, I've seen numbers ranging upwards to almost a trillion dollars in costs for a payroll tax cut alone, whereas the one-time Romney bucks might be between $250 billion and $300 billion, depending on how it's put together. That's a lot less money. It's a lot faster. It's a lot more direct. It goes to more people. Not everybody has a W-2 that, you know, or whatever we call it, that has withholding from it, right? I mean, there are a lot of people in a gig economy who would not be benefiting from a Exactly. And this is my beef, by the way.

Oh, go ahead, David. Last point. Well, just the very last thing, just from a principled fairness justice standpoint, the thing I like about it is that, so the government is intervening dramatically in certain cities and states in the U.S. to force people to end their productive livelihood, at least for the time being. Their means of earning a livelihood for the time being. the government is forcing that people who'd be willing to work wanting to accept the risks to work it's forcing a stop to that to then come in on top of that and say okay we're going to force the

stop but there's going to be a degree of compensation seems to me to be from a fairness and justice standpoint not just dispensable i mean defensible but maybe indispensable in that in that context so i think Jonah perhaps most to your point that the I'm going to take issue with the conservative talking points here. Those who are falling back on these sort of normal conservative talking points, frankly, even about debt and deficit, but I'm not going to really do too much on that. They ring so hollow to me, so out of touch with what's going on. For instance, I saw, what was it, Laffer, Moore, a group of them talking about why

it would be better to do the payroll tax cut over the Romney bucks, we'll now call them, you know, because it, quote, incentivizes work. I found that to be an offensive argument as we are telling people that they cannot work in certain industries, particularly like the very people who are least likely to get a payroll tax cut are the ones who were working and are being told they can't work and you're saying that it's because they're lazy? I mean, shove it up. places. And on the means testing, I agree with what you're saying, David. I think all that is accurate as far as it goes. But I also think that part of a national emergency and part of this

pandemic is for as long as you can, you want everyone to feel like they're in this together. And I think our entire tax code builds resentment against other people. and it puts you in one category and someone else in another category and you're subsidizing their lifestyle and that's what, you know, at least to some extent, I think, has contributed to polarization. And by saying, nope, everyone gets $1,000. And to Josh Barrow's point, yes, we're going to try to build a shame culture around whether you should keep that $1,000 is great.

We need more civil society weighing in on this and less government saying, David, I'm taking your tax dollars and giving them to Jonah. how do you think you're going to feel about Jonah then in the middle of a national crisis? Well, was that question named to me? I'll jump in. I mean, first, I mean, I agree with the general thrust of the conversation here. I think we have to be mindful that this will be redistributive. I mean, it's inescapably redistributive.

The government doesn't have money. So ultimately, this is money that's coming from taxpayers one way or another at some point sooner or in all likelihood later when we have a real debt crisis. On the broader point, I think it is important to be, as we see elected officials make these policies, to really scrutinize how they're doing it. I mean, I was talking to members of the House last Friday as they were closing in on, finalizing the terms of their package. This was, as we've seen repeatedly over the past couple decades, another of those examples of a bill where nobody knew what was in it, minutes before they were required to vote on it, less than an hour before they were required to vote on it, it was still the case that people didn't know what was in it. It was more than 100 pages. People

weren't given the opportunity to read it. It was anything but targeted. I mean, this was a sort of free-for-all, as we've seen again and again and again with these emergency spending packages. And the other concern about them is emergency spending packages are rarely emergencies only. These things live well beyond their emergencies. They survive well beyond their emergencies. So I do think it's important to be mindful of that and to ask people, in some cases, to slow down a little bit. Now, obviously, this is urgent. It's necessary to send some of this cash back into the economy, but I don't think it needs to be, we don't need to be irresponsible about the way we do it.

And final point on the broader question, I do think it will be very important as we contemplate how to build these packages to keep in mind what we've seen over the past decade. I think one of the reasons that we had, You know, the Tea Party and I would say later Donald Trump was the sense that in the bailouts that followed the 2008 fiscal crisis, money went to save big banks and it went to save big industry. And it didn't go as much to the average working man or woman who, you know, had worked hard, had saved money, had invested in 401Ks, had done the things that everybody had said responsible people do and then got to. punished for it. And I think one of the reasons that were here is the aftermath of that. You think, and this is a pessimistic note, you think about the kinds of divisions we've seen

in our society over the past five years and the rise of populism on both the left and the right in what was a very strong economy, probably not the booming economy that the president pretended, but not the hollowed-out economy that some of his critics suggested either. If we had those kinds of tensions, people at each other's throats, to a certain extent, or at least the political class, I think it's very likely that those will be exacerbated as we start looking at real economic hardship potentially in the years to come. Although sometimes common enemies are helpful, when all is well you end up fighting amongst yourselves, in the foxhole.

True. I mean, that could be, that would be, I'd be thrilled with that outcome. I bet you on it. So let's, let's take this because I think that what you just said, Steve, about sort of the resentment towards the bailout on banks and that not going to working people is an articulate way of summarizing what happened at the debate on Sunday and Bernie Sanders message. that they're, you know, we've done bailouts for banks, and it didn't go to anyone else, and that's the economy that's not working for people.

Last night, Sanders lost all three states that were up. It was supposed to be four, and Ohio, at the very last minute, canceled or postponed, rather, their primary. You know, to some extent, I think that was vindicated, given the turnout in Illinois was about 40% down from previous from 2016 close to that for 2008 let's start at the very beginning David did DeWine make the right call in Ohio postponing the primary I tend to think that he did but I'm not it's a hard hard call I mean there are there are races that exist and before we were talking about the we were before we started recording the the podcast

Sarah, you were talking about how many of these primaries, you're not just talking about races, the race for the Democratic nomination for the presidency being relevant. There are down-ballot races. There are other races that are important for the normal administration of government in these states. And so I think it's a very hard, hard call. But I do think if you're going to tell people, you've got to be very careful about interacting with other human beings.

You've got to maintain social distancing. We're going to be closing bars. We're going to be closing restaurants. Your daily life is going to be disrupted except for politics. And then we're going to all gather together at these really big polling stations where social distancing is a near impossibility where disproportionately senior citizen volunteers will be receiving your voter registration information. There's an inconsistency there combined with a lack of necessity for the. the election taking place right now. And, and, you know, one of the things I saw some people saying, well, this is democracy in danger. This is democracy in danger. We got to draw a really bright,

lying distinction between a presidential primary and a general election. Because a presidential primary is undertaken for the benefit of a private party. It is an election for the benefit. It is the allocation of state resources for the benefit of a private party. And that is the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, which is a private entity. The state is facilitating a private entity's private decision-making process for the selection of a nominee for president. There's not even a requirement constitutionally in any way, shape, or form that these parties have to have primaries. As Jonah is fond of saying, we could go back to the smoke-filled room. You don't even have to have this. So this is a non-essential function of government.

that is undertaken for the benefit of a private party. And under those circumstances, it feels to me like, as an act of consistency and safety, I would support his decision to delay. And in an interesting way, the huge Florida turnout number, to me, sort of vindicates the Ohio decision. That there was still an awful lot of people, even in the backdrop of a coronavirus threat, who are willing to just go ahead and gather. And I love the participation in democracy, but I feel like this was a moment in time

where I think DeWine had the right call. Anyone disagree? No, not really. I mean, I'm on DeWine's side, and I agree with all David's points about, you know, you know, canceling a party primary is legally no different than canceling a party convention or conference or caucus.

or for that matter ultimate frisbee match it's not a government function uh the the the point i just would want to add is this is like enough with the goddamn primary already the democratic party you just should call it um i'm sorry for taking the lord's name invading david i know sarah doesn't care and uh but you know the democratic party Biden has this running away And even if something happens to Biden, it doesn't by default go to Bernie. The other candidates would get back in. Something else would happen. Bernie should get out for all the obvious reasons.

But the Democratic Party should, you know, man up. Sorry to be so toxicly masculine here. And just say, we're done with this now. And he's going to be, he's the presumptive nominee. Who cares? I mean, with proportional, you know, the way the primary works on the Democratic side, where everyone gets some delegates once they pass 15 percent, it makes it like almost literally mathematically impossible at this point for Bernie to win. So just be done with it and stop, you know, making this a huge issue when it doesn't need to be. But that's not why you're staying in.

And it would make it a bigger issue. I mean, I agree with David and Jonah on Mike DeWine's decision. I think it was a smart decision. look, either this is a national health emergency or it's not. And if it is, we should act like it is. And if it's not, then more people are going to get sick. I disagree strongly with Jonah on what the Democratic Party should do. The biggest challenge for the Democrats between now and November is to unite those two different camps.

I think there are probably 50 different camps, but to oversimplify, the Bernie camps with the non-Bernie camp. and to try to bring in the Bernie bros and sisters and others into the Biden camp to build the Democratic coalition. I think if the Democratic Party were to step in now, it would confirm every theory, conspiracy, crazy, or real that Bernie Sanders supporters have about the Democratic Party. I think give him time. I don't think Biden is going to get those dead enders anyway. I think most of the people who like Bernie, there are fewer of them than people thought. And I'm not saying that Biden has to like, you know, just pee from a great height on the whole Sanders movement.

But that's what he'd be doing. He has such a great opportunity to just sort of, the party has such a great opportunity to just sort of say, look, enough with this stuff. And put some pressure on Bernie. I mean, look, I personally think that Tom Perez should put Bernie on an ice flow and send him out into the art. Dick. I mean, just be done with him. But that's the big argument that Bernie people have made against the Democratic Party for literally for years. And you'll just be confirming every part of this. Look, I think he's likely to get out. You had a statement from his campaign chairman this morning that he's assessing his options going forward. I think there will be tremendous pressure.

Better to have it come sort of from rank and file Democrats and from Democratic governors who are taking this seriously, then to have it come top down from the leaders of the Democratic Party saying to him, hey, you got to get out. I mean, if he steps out for the better case, you know, if he steps out and he says, look, I need to, I really would like to be president of the United States. I'd like to have the Democratic nomination. The responsible thing for me to do now is to step aside so that we don't put people in jeopardy by asking them to go to the polls, to cast their ballots in these things. I'm going to step aside. I think that has the potential for. Democrats to be a healing moment that would have seemed elusive had we talked about it six weeks

ago. I think all that's true, but I think it's relevant to look at their strategic interest. And by there, I mean, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In 2016, when Bernie stayed in until June, he didn't endorse Hillary until July at the convention, they were able to get a number of concessions on the policy committee and on the platform committee. And on how. various caucuses and primaries would be run from that point forward as we saw with Iowa. The fact that the DNC gave into it or allowed it, whatever you want to call it, set up the incentives for this time. The more delegates they get, the more members they get on the platform committee, which they care deeply about. This has always been a policy movement for them, according to their own

standards. So why not then collect these delegates if the DNC says that's how they're going to determine how big a voice you have? You know, I don't think that game will work this time. If you go back to late to 2016, they were in a position of real strength. I mean, they had almost beaten Hillary. There was a sense, and I can't remember exactly when the vindication began to emerge through the various hacks, but a sense that we perhaps could have won this except for the thumb, the DNC's thumb on the scales, regardless of whether, you know, on the merits, that's true. It was so close that it was at least a plausible argument. Here, you know, I never thought I would say these words, but the Joe Biden campaign has nuked them from orbit. This has been an absolute, utter, catastrophic route. And it's even worse than it looks because some of the closeness that you see on Super Tuesday,

some of the closeness immediately after Super Tuesday was the result of early artificial result of early voting. So they have just been nuked. Their guy has absolutely no path forward. Their entire function right now is to be sort of the fly in the ointment, the irritation to Biden, the obstacle to unity with no strength at all. And I think if they try to double down on that weak hand, they're going to find out that Red Rose Twitter is basically the extent of the movement and of the of the of the of the core of the movement and Red Rose Twitter ain't that big yeah I just think that the the people that Biden needs and if you look at the poll if you look at the exit polls in places like Michigan they're not the Bernie bros I mean they'll get so Biden will get some segment of Bernie's coalition

no matter what because they hate Trump too what Biden really needs is the suburb Bourbon, former Republicans, former independents, who turned out in droves. And it turns out that the Biden, that Bernie's message is much less popular with the base of the Democratic Party than we thought. It was artificially boosted because people were voting against Hillary. That seems obvious now. And, you know, so Biden shouldn't, you know, shouldn't be disrespectful to Bernie, but, and when I say the Democrat, I mean, my druthers would be for the Democratic Party to just sort of say that's it, because I want the parties to get stronger and be more assertive. I think strong parties reduce, you know, political polarization and partisanship.

But, you know, they can go to Bernie and say, hey, look, what do you want? You know, you can have one plank in the platform. Is it to collectivize agriculture? Is it to, you know, invade Poland, annex, Crimea, whatever it is that you want from your platform to embrace the Hegelian dialectic is the true arbiter of history? whatever it is, you get one thing and buy them off because that's what Biden, I mean, that's what Bernie Sanders has been for 30 years is a single issue candidate who just basically is a gadfly. And so reward his gadflyness and get them off the stage.

So they did have one big win last night. Dan Lipinski was the last pro-life Democrat, I think, in the House of Representatives. And the Sanders and AOC backed candidate one. They've actually had quite a few losses in some of these primary challenges. So that was, I think, their, their silver lining of why to keep Bernie on the ballot through the rest of these, if they have more of these style down-ballot challenges. Okay, I want to wrap on something that I've been curious about for you guys. All three of you have children who are now at home with you. Steve, you talked about this a little off-pod, if you will.

you're talking to your kids about this. How are you approaching that? How are they taking it? Because to me, I was in college for September 11th. I think it, it definitely changed my worldview. But I think it changed my generation's worldview about how we approached politics, America, our culture, et cetera. I think it will for this generation. I'm curious how you talk to them, what you think they're thinking. yeah i mean i'm not let me start by saying i'm not sure i i did it the right way but i but i did it kind of the only way i knew how we have as i mentioned earlier we have um another family staying with us and their kids are roughly the same ages as as our kids um so we've got 15 13 10 and 3 and um we didn't include the the younger kids obviously but we included the older kids And basically, I just sat them down with my computer at the kitchen table and did a 30-minute class on what this was and why we're doing this crazy stuff and how if they think it feels weird, they're right. It is weird. It's weird for adults, too.

You know, I tried to find the balance between making them take it seriously and understand that, no, we're not going to allow people into our little bubble and we're not going to go out. of our little bubble. We're going to all stay here and we're going to, you know, self-quarantine and nobody's going to be getting in or out. And then explain the reasons why that was because, you know, they're following this a little bit on their own and they see that this doesn't tend to have direct negative effects on young people. The thing that I found very useful was the Washington Post simulation about the various ways of containing or midday. the spread. The Post had this wonderful simulation for people who haven't seen it. I highly recommend going there. I read yesterday that it was the single biggest online piece read at the

Washington Post in the Post's digital history, and there's a reason for it. It walks you through sort of step by step what is accomplished by social distancing and real social distancing, partial social distancing, and what have you. And it did it in a way that I think was really easy for kids and people like me who have sort of kid-level capabilities to understand. And walking them through that and showing how the spread of the disease is decreased dramatically if you stay in your own little bubbles was very helpful. And then I just took questions from them.

They had a lot of sort of pretty smart and sophisticated. questions. And I think they left by, you know, sort of with an understanding that this is serious and that we have to treat it seriously, but not too terribly freaked out. I will say the one mistake we made was then having a showing of the movie Contagion right after that, which maybe undid all of the careful things that I had tried to do in the actual mini tutorial. That movie messes you up. Yeah. I mean, it's a good, look, I think the movie itself is very, very well done. it, you know, the way that we, they had lots of additional questions after they watched the movie, you know, and I said this would be the absolute worst case scenario, the kinds of things that are depicted in the movie, but the first half of the movie walks you through something that looks and feels a little bit like what we're going through right now. And in that sense, I think, you know, having that worst case scenario play out in front of them, maybe a little extreme, but not probably terrible for them to see, particularly because it came in the context of a, of a discussion. about what this all is.

David, your youngest is 12, right? Yes. Yes. So I'm in a unique situation. So I have a 21-year-old daughter and her 22-year-old husband who are with us now, a 19-year-old son, and 12-year-old daughter. And so the older kids are, we're all kind of, if you could read like our family group text, they're all just imagine like a version of our dispatch slag. channel, flinging back and forth tweets about what's going on. It's just the older kids are fully engaged in following politics, following the news. And so we've been kind of all

learning and going through this together. The big challenge is, you know, when you have a 12-year-old, you don't, you can't pull her into this in the same way. You want to protect her from some of the extremes of anxiety and really make sure that you're not assuming that she's keeping up with everything in the way that everybody else is. And so one of the things that we haven't really had sort of sat down and had like a big talk about it because we've been having small talks about it from day one. So what we have used this time for is this incredibly productive exercise of debating and talking about the merits of various YouTube conspiracy theories that my son brings up at dinner. We believe ironically, but he expresses them with just enough credulity that it

creates an animated discussion. And it actually gets to be hilarious at times. But I've had more discussions about the, what is it, the 400-foot wall around the earth that proves that we're flat that the earth is flat than I'd ever thought have had. And they're pretty funny. So we're trying to make the best of it all. And then with the 12-year-old, we're just, we're, you know, we're using this as an opportunity. It's have the appropriate conversations as much as we can, but also trying to make it fun because she's getting to spend a heck of a lot more time with her older siblings, who she misses very much because they've been off at college. And that includes bringing in, and there go the dogs. And that includes bringing in, bringing her into things

like Lord of the Rings, which she hasn't seen before, and, you know, just staying up late, which she doesn't normally get to do and trying to make the best of it. So, Jonah, how have you explained this to Zoe and Pippa? They love home quarantine. The dogs think it's fantastic how all the entire pack is home. My daughter is a little more complicated. First of all, when Steve was talking about how they invited another family into their house and then they had to explain things to the kids, I was really hoping he was going to get really, really dark

and talk about how we don't think it's going to go this way, but in worst case scenario, because we have these people here, we do have our own alternative food supply. And that we love them and we want to protect them until they become livestock. which is a very walking dead thing. But David will remember the terminal stuff from like season four Walking Dead.

Remember it well. And no, so for my daughter, I mean, as I think a lot of listeners probably know, she has been in Spain for her junior year of high school until last Friday. And she went to bed Thursday night thinking she was going to have a normal day of school and woke up to her phone blowing up with people saying, we have 24 hours to get out of the country. And so there's a lot of disappointment in that because she was finally, like, getting into a groove of being there.

She was about to go on a fun spring break thing in Europe. That got blown up. And then she comes back and encounters all of this crazy emotional culture shock. And she doesn't know how she's going to do school and it's going to have to be online for the rest of the year. She can't matriculate back into her actual school. D.C. because we don't even know if they're going to have classes. And it's, you know, I don't talk about my daughter in these terms very much, but, you know, one of the things that's

sort of a challenge for her is she has a very, very powerful sense of nostalgia in a very small C conservative streak in her. And so I'll just give you one example. She really didn't want to turn 10 because her basic position was single digits were awesome and it's all downhill after you hit double digits. Not wrong. She's kind of got a point, you know. But so I asked her, you know, how she was feeling about it. One of the things she said to me is she finds it all a little bit depressing.

Again, she's still not really grasping that this thing isn't really about her because she just had the most crazy last 72 hours and she's, you know, a teenage girl. But she was like, one of the things I find depressing about it is that this is going to be one of those things that you were eating. either alive and aware for or you weren't, and it's going to make me feel older than people who are younger than me for the rest of my life. And it's kind of a good point, you know? I mean, it's like, you know, we talk about people who are around for 9-11 and who weren't, and, you know, this is going to be, this is like her 9-11 now, you know, and so the last thing I was going to say, because I meant to bring it up earlier, people should be on the watch now.

Maybe this should be a recurring topic on this podcast of stuff that is going to have legs long after this is over. For example, people of a certain age just do not know that the cable news networks did not have the crawl of breaking news constantly streaming along the bottom of the screen. That was basically imposed during the aftermath of 9-11, where you have these, you know, breaking news stories that just sort of slide along the bottom of the screen. They didn't do that until then. And now it's a permanent part of like sort of how we perceive what news does. It'd be interesting, and I think there are a lot of other things like that. It'd be interesting to see what sticks around for a long time.

Do we lose handshakes? I hope so. I know you were, I'm kind of with you on that. I certainly love. I have a feminist range about handshakes, too. truly done with, but, you know, anyway. So here's my list of things I'll be looking for in the now to months to come. A baby boom in nine to ten months.

A divorce boom in three months. Sort of the opposite of the baby boom, if you will, but for the same reasons, frankly. And then I'm very curious whether we will see an increase or decrease in food poisoning as people go out to eat less. On the one hand, a lot of food poisoning does come from restaurants. On the other hand, we have a lot of people trying to cook with raw meat and vegetables that they don't really quite know what to do with. And last, but related, fires. Will we see more kitchen fires as people also try to use their kitchens for the first time? Yes to all of those.

Well, on that note, let's do this again soon, guys. we'll continue to invite our animals in to join the podcast now. And a lot of hoodie wearing is getting done, I see, from looking around. And who knows? I mean, things have changed a lot since our podcast a week ago when we were all together. So let's see what a week brings. Someone pointed out on Twitter that we're about six weeks away from finding out what a lot of people's real hair color is. Yes.

That's another one to keep an eye on. Jonas is red. Well, you know, in six weeks, you'll see me in dreadlocks, guys, at this growth rate. I knew you shaved your head. Talk soon.